9 MI CROBI OLOGY AUSTRALI A MARCH 2012

In Focus
Richard Strange
Department of Biological Sciences
Birkbeck College
London University
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX
Tel 020 8660 3770
Email r.strange@sbc.bbk.ac.uk
Plants are the primary means by which food is produced
for living organisms. These include the species Homo
sapiens all 7 billion plus of us. But we are far from
being the only species that depends on plants. There are
many herbivores with which we compete, some of the
most devastating being insects. Moreover, plants deemed
useful as sources of food may be outcompeted by other
plants of less practical use: these are often regarded
as weeds. More insidiously, there are many infectious
agents ranging from viroids, consisting of a few hundred
nucleotides, through viruses, bacteria, mycoplasmas,
nematodes and fungi to plants themselves that parasitise
those crop plants we use as sources of food.
There is little doubt that plants have always been parasitised as
they present a banquet of tempting nutrients to any organism
with the necessary equipment to invade and absorb the goods
on offer. Once humans started to cultivate plants as crops, about
10,000 years ago, these plant parasites became our enemies.
Perhaps the earliest evidence of their recognition was in the
Romans sacrifice to the god, Rubigo, in order to avert attacks
by a rust fungus on their wheat (Figure 1). However, it was the
great Irish potato famine of the late 1840s that gave the impetus
to the study and combating of organisms that cause disease of
crop plants (Figure 2).
Many plant pathogens are highly destructive of crop plants and
consequently threaten the food security of those who depend
on them. The toll of the Irish potato famine is not known with
great accuracy but it is estimated that about 1 million people out
of a population of 8 million died of starvation and a further 1.5
million emigrated either to England, North America or Australia.
Of those who took the longer voyages, about a quarter did
not survive owing to their malnourishment and ill health on
embarkation. The causal organism was long thought to be a
fungus but more recently nucleic acid and protein sequencing
have shown that it is a member of the Oomycetes, a group of
organisms more closely related to the golden-brown algae
1
. The
potato pathogen is known as Phytophthora infestans and the
global damage it causes to the crop is estimated at $3 billion per
annum. The organism is also a destructive pathogen of tomato.
P. infestans is an example of a hemibiotroph. These pathogens
have a short period of peaceful co-existence with their host
before necrosis sets in. Other pathogens are necrotrophs,
causing death of the plant and living off the dying and dead cells
or biotrophs, which maintain the plant host in a living condition
but subvert its metabolism. There are numerous examples of all
three types of parasitism so selection of examples is difficult.
Leaving P. infestans as our example of a hemibiotroph, an
example of a necrotroph is Ascochyta rabiei, which causes
Ascochyta blight of chickpea. It is a fungus that causes havoc in
chickpeas grown in cool and moist climates. When the attack is
heavy the plant blackens and dies, a disaster for countries such as
Pakistan where people depend on it for sustenance, in particular
because of its high protein content. How does the pathogen kill
the plant? One possibility is that it produces toxins. Certainly A.
rabiei produces compounds in culture that kill cells of chickpea.
These were isolated and identified as Solanapyrones A, B and
C (Figure 3). The question is, how important are they in the
disease syndrome? Some evidence was obtained when cuttings
of plants were placed in dilute solutions of one of the toxins and
developed breakage of petioles, a characteristic symptom of the
disease
2
. It seems probable that the cells surrounding the stele
of the plant lose their turgor and, therefore, no longer provide
sufficient support, the stele tissue alone being insufficient. Better
evidence would be to produce knock-out mutants of the fungus
lacking toxin production and to demonstrate that such mutants
have lost virulence. Better still would be the demonstration
that both toxin production and virulence were restored by
reintroduction of the appropriate genes to the mutants. From a
practical point of view, this would establish the rationale of using
the toxins to select toxin-insensitive genotypes of chickpea which
would be expected to be resistant to the pathogen. In addition,
it might prove possible to produce such genotypes by genetic
modification with genes that encode enzymes that destroy the
toxins.
Stem rust of wheat, caused by Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici is an
example of a biotroph (Figure 1). The fungus enters the plant via
Role of plant pathogens in food insecurity
MI CROBI OLOGY AUSTRALI A MARCH 2012 10
In Focus
stomata, producing a substomatal vesicle from which infection
hyphae ramify. From these haustoria penetrate the walls of cells
but not their plasmalemmas. Concentrations of cytokinins, which
are plant hormones, increase in the vicinity of the infection sites
causing these areas to act as sinks for nutrients and thus feed the
fungus at the expense of the host. Much of these nutrients goes
to the production of huge numbers of spores of a rust colour. At
harvest, these may cover the harvesting equipment, giving it the
appearance of being rusty and also giving the fungus its trivial
name.
Plant pathogens have proved to be slippery adversaries as,
like all other organisms, they evolve and, ironically, it is our
species, Homo sapiens, that has promoted this evolution. How
can this be? The cause of the sometimes speedy evolution of
plant pathogens lies in the domestication of crop plants and
the selection of those that are resistant. Once Mendels laws
of inheritance had been rediscovered and Biffen
3
had shown
that resistance was a Mendelian trait, it became feasible to
breed specifically for resistance. This has been very successful
in some cases when the resistance has proved durable but, in
many others, almost as fast as the breeder has produced a new
resistant variety, the pathogen has also produced a variant that
can overcome the resistance. Part of the reason for this rapid
adaptation of the pathogen to the new variety is our predilection
for growing genetically uniform crops over wide areas, providing
a huge selection pressure for any pathogen able to overcome the
plants defences. Hence, the so-called boom and bust cycle of
new cultivars they become popular to grow because of their
resistance to a given pathogen (boom) but then succumb to a
variant of the same pathogen that can overcome the resistance
(bust). At the genetic level, the relationship between those
plants and their pathogens which behave in this way is described
as gene-for-gene and was first established by the pioneering
work of Flor
4
with flax (Linum usitatissimum) and its rust
(Melampsora lini). More accurately, the relationship is described
as allele-for-allele.
The simplest expression of the gene-for-gene relationship is
that for every gene encoding resistance in the plant there is a
corresponding gene encoding avirulence in the pathogen. It
follows that if the avirulence gene in the pathogen is eliminated
or masked in some way, the pathogen is, once more, virulent.
Not surprisingly, the nature of these gene pairs has excited
Figure 3. Symptoms of Ascochyta blight of chickpea and the
structures of the toxins that may be responsible for them. Note the
breakage of stems and petioles, symptoms which develop when
cuttings are placed in dilute solutions of the toxin solanapyrone A.
Figure 1. Stem rust of wheat caused by Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici.
Inset showing a close-up of a stem heavily infected with the fungus.
The rust-coloured spores seen here are disseminated by wind, giving
any surface they alight on en masse, such as farm equipment, a rusty
appearance.
Figure 2. A potato crop ravaged by Phytophthora infestans,
the cause of the great Irish potato famine in the late 1840s
Photograph courtesy of Alison Lees, The James Hutton Institute,
Invergowrie, Scotland, UK.
11 MI CROBI OLOGY AUSTRALI A MARCH 2012
In Focus
considerable interest. The first report of the cloning of an
avirulence gene was in 1984. Staskawicz and co-workers
5
cloned
an avirulence gene from Pseudomonas syringae pv. glycinea,
a pathogen of soybean. Sequence data showed that it encoded
a single 100 kDa protein. Since these pioneering experiments,
many avirulence genes have been cloned, not only from bacteria
but also from fungi, nematodes and viruses and the molecules
they are responsible for synthesising, termed effectors, have
been isolated and identified.
What of the corresponding resistance genes? It took a little
longer for the first resistance gene to be cloned because of the
difficulty in locating the appropriate gene in the large amount of
plant DNA. But in 1993 Martin and co-workers
6
were successful
in cloning the Pto gene from tomato which confers resistance to
Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato. Since then a large number
of resistance genes have been cloned and their structures
determined including those from flax, the original plant for
which the gene-for-gene concept was proposed, and its rust (for
a review see reference 7). Here 30 resistance genes have been
mapped to five loci (K, L, M, N and P) and 19 of these have been
cloned. They all encode the same class of intracellular proteins,
namely the Toll interleukin 1 receptor-nucleotide binding site-
leucine-rich repeat (TIR-NBS-LRR). Most of the variation among
these proteins occurs in the LRR domain and this is the region
that is important in determining recognition of avirulence in the
pathogen. Avirulence gene products of the pathogen are small
proteins which are expressed in haustoria and are secreted into
host cells.
Two general models have been proposed as to how the products
of resistance and avirulence genes interact, directly and indirectly.
Three examples of the direct model are the rice rice blast
pathogen, Arabidopsis thaliana Ralstonia solanacearum, and
tobacco Tobacco Mosaic Virus. In the indirect model, resistance
proteins detect changes in other plant proteins brought about by
avirulence proteins. An example is the interaction of A. thaliana
and Pseudomonas syringae. Here the protein products of
resistance genes RPM1, RPS2 and RPS5 recognise changes in the
plant proteins RIN4 and PBS1 caused by the presence of bacterial
effectors.
There is now abundant evidence that resistance-avirulence
gene pairs co-evolve and the reader is referred to the recent
review of Brown and Tellier
8
for further information on this
point. Moreover, the long-held view that necrotrophic fungi,
blast their way through host tissue with a battery of lytic and
degradative enzymes appears not to be true
9
. It seems that
there are examples of these plant pathogens that also produce
effectors similar to those of biotrophs but in these instances they
are responsible for causing susceptibility rather than resistance.
While not wishing to discomfort the reader unduly, I hope
the above short account has brought into focus the very real
dangers presented by plant pathogens to the food security of
the planets human population. Many of these organisms are
adept at eluding the resistance mechanisms of their hosts and
are constantly evolving new biotypes that can successfully attack
plants that were previously resistant. We need to be constantly
on guard if we are to keep their ravages within bounds and avoid
the famines they have caused in the past and have the potential
to do so again.
References
1. Badauf S.L. et al. (2000) A kingdom-level phylogeny of eukaryotes based on
combined protein data. Science 290, 972977.
2. Hamid, K. and Strange, R.N. (2000) Phytotoxicity of solanapyrones A and B
produced by the chickpea pathogen Ascochyta rabiei (Pass.) Labr. and the
apparent metabolism of solanapyrone A by chickpea tissues. Physiol. Mol.
Plant Pathol. 49, 343357.
3. Biffen, R.H. (1905) Mendels laws of inheritance and wheat breeding J.
Agricultural Sci. 1, 448.
4. Flor, H.H. (1971) Current status of the gene-for-gene concept. Ann. Rev.
Phytopathol. 9, 275296.
5. Staskawicz B.J. et al. (1984) Cloned avirulence gene of Pseudomonas syringae
pv. glycinea determines race-specific incompatibility on Glycine max (L) Merr.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 81, 60246028.
6. Martin, G.B.A. et al. (1993) Map-based cloning of a protein-kinase gene
conferring disease resistance in tomato. Science 262, 14321436.
7. Ravensdale, M. et al. (2011) Co-evolutionary interactions between host
resistance and pathogen effector genes in flax rust disease. Molec. Plant
Pathol. 12, 93102.
8. Brown, J.K.M. and Tellier, A. (2011) Plant-parasite coevolution: bridging the
gap between genetics and ecology. Ann. Rev. Phytopathol. 49, 345367.
9. Oliver, R.P. and Solomon, P.S. (2010) New developments in pathogenicity and
virulence of necrotrophs. Curr. Op. Plant Biol. 13, 415419.
Biography
Dr Richard Strange is a plant pathologist and is currently
Honorary Professor of Biology, University College London (UCL)
and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Biological and
Chemical Sciences, Birkbeck College, University of London. He
has published over 100 scientific papers and two books: Plant
Disease Control, Towards Environmentally Acceptable Methods
(1992) and Introduction to Plant Pathology (2003). He is
co-founder (with Peter Scott) and Editor-in-Chief of the journal,
Food Security: the Science, Sociology and Economics of Food
Production and Access to Food, which began publication in the
spring of 2009 and already has an impact factor of 1.658. www.
springer.com/life+sci/agriculture/journal/12571
He is married to Lilian, a professional pianist, and they have two
grown up children and four grandchildren. His main hobby is
playing the cello and he performs regularly in recitals of the UCL
Chamber Music Club.